This invention relates to managing storage systems in general and in particular, to transforming data stored in snapshots in a storage system.
Data stored in file systems or database systems is often transformed for various reasons. For example, the data stored in a file system may be processed by a particular version of an application. A new version of the application may be configured to process data in a different format. Accordingly, the data stored in the file system may be transformed to change the format of the data to allow the data to be processed by the new version of the application. Accordingly, the data of these fields may have to be transformed to conform to the requirements of the new version of the software.
Such transformation is typically performed using instructions or commands stored in a script. Several application and systems, for example, database systems are often complex and require help from experts for development and testing of the transform script as well as for managing execution of the transform scripts. Execution of such transformations is further complicated by the fact that the system may be a production system that is constantly being used. Execution of these transformations may require the system to be made unavailable for significant periods of time. Enterprises typically cannot afford to take production systems offline for long periods of time. As product release cycles shorten, transformation of data is required more often. As a result, conventional techniques for performing transformations are often expensive and take significant amount of time and resources.